by Peter Geye
“I can’t say I had any expectations, not particularly. But they certainly do break my heart a little.”
FOR THREE DAYS and three nights Gus hadn’t checked his maps. On the fourth morning, soon after they’d broken camp, the wilderness—though it hadn’t, in fact, changed at all—became a foreign land. So he took the compass from his pocket and confirmed his direction. All that day they continued south or east. He kept one eye on the woods ahead and the other on the needle of the compass in his outstretched hand, always south or east. When they crossed a river flowing down that same course, he knew they’d bridged the divide.
Gus wore his snowshoes and his coat and hat. The Duluth pack had been fashioned into a harness and from it a length of rope was tethered to the canoe, where his father sat cocooned in the bearskin and wool and down of the sleeping sack, his red hat pulled down over his ears. His union suit was soaked through with a fevered sweat. One foot was in his stinking boot and the other wrapped in Gus’s T-shirt and stiff with frozen blood.
Pulling that load was, on the lakes and frozen rivers, with the north wind at his back, surprisingly easy. But up in the woods, through the underbrush and beneath countless soaring pines, around rocks and deadfall, into and out of the steep gullies of ancient streambeds, it could take an hour to cover a hundred yards. He consoled himself with the thought that hauling his father through the wilderness—bringing him home—was an act of deliverance, and then he felt he was sailing among the clouds. Until the straps of the pack pulled against his galled shoulders and returned him to earth.
And so when the going became most difficult he would hum those old chansons he’d learned the season before and press on, even as he sometimes plunged through snow up to his waist.
That fourth day, he labored through the gloaming and pitched camp between two trees alongshore. He packed the snow with his boots, hardly able to lift his legs after his day in the harness. At the mouth of the tent he built a fire, then gathered wood to last the night and melted snow in the pot he’d salvaged from the fire and forced his father to eat a ration of dried fruit and a chocolate bar. He had the same himself, blocked the wind with the upturned canoe, curled into the sleeping sack and the bearskin beside his father—now fallen into some fantasia between sleep and death from which he didn’t stir, except to eat and sleep and, later, rant and moan like a lunatic—and fell himself into a dreamless slumber. He woke on the hour to stoke the fire but knew this only because when he rose for good, ten hours later, the fire was still ablaze.
In that predawn darkness he melted enough snow to fill the canteen and ate the last of the chocolate and a handful of the fruit. He took down and rolled up the tent, and lifted his father into the canoe, pulled on the Duluth pack as later in life he would slip his blazer on for a day in the classroom, oriented them southward, and finally struck out across the lake for home, their campfire still burning behind them, the only thing warm or light in the entire world.
By daybreak snow was falling, and by noon even harder, but it did not start blowing until that night, when Gus raised the tent in a blizzard. Somewhere that day he’d lost one of his mittens.
—
Five days earlier—the morning Harry shot Charlie—Gus had kept his eyes closed for a long time indeed. So long it might have seemed he was sleeping. But when he finally opened them he saw an inch of powdery snow had covered his sleeves and the Duluth pack. The silence was deathly until he heard his father dragging himself back through the trees farther inshore, a trailing blood came along and his face was already ashen, his eyes nearly uninhabited. Gus would not allow himself to look around the woods for Charlie.
“Now it’s up to you,” Harry said as he tossed the Remington in the snow and collapsed beside him.
“What happened?” Gus said, pointing at the spattering in the snow. “Whose blood is that?”
Answering, Harry pulled his foot around. His grimace only made the colorlessness of his face more profound. The boot was shot half off and blood bubbled from the wound like a stew simmering on the stove. His hands were smeared with blood. Gus looked at his father’s bloodstained coat and union suit and asked him if he’d been shot more than once.
Harry shook his head, his eyes fluttering.
“Where’s Charlie? What happened to him?”
Harry tried to focus on Gus but was too far gone. He did manage to say, before he passed out, “Charlie who?”
—
Gus wrapped his father in the sleeping sack and the bearskin and ran back across the bay to where the shack used to be. All that remained was the chimney and foundation and the still-burning cord of oak that hissed and smoked in the snowfall. The warmth of the fire was splendid after the everlasting night beforehand. He was hoping the remaining canoe hadn’t burned, and indeed it had not, set off as it was on the edge of the clearing. He cleared off the snow and dragged it out to the icy shore. He went back for one more look at the fire, and that’s when he saw the pot sitting atop the ruins of the stove. He kicked a charred two-by-four that must have fallen from the joists and picked it up to reach for the pot, which was still warm to the touch.
Harry had pulled himself up against the tree by the time he got back. The bearskin and sleeping sack had slid off, and Gus pulled them back over him, then set about making a fire to melt water. The richness of this was not lost on him: setting another fire.
After he’d melted water he examined his father’s boot. This roused Harry, of course, and he came from his blackout like a man who’d been underwater—gasping for air, eyes wide in terror. But as soon as he understood who and where he was he asked Gus for something to bite down on.
The blood came steadily as Gus removed the boot. Its cap had been shot off, and so it was his father’s toes that were bleeding—three injured, two blown off altogether. He used his pocketknife to cut the sock away, and by the time he’d washed the foot with warm water and wrapped it in a T-shirt, Harry was unconscious again.
It was still midmorning when Gus fashioned the Duluth-pack harness and tied it to the forward thwart of the canoe. He had already arranged his father in the boat, resting his back against the yoke with the tent underneath him. The rest of their outfit Gus stored in the stern. The food supply was so sorry there wasn’t enough to feed a small child for the time it would take them to get home, never mind two men, one with the hardest job of his life before him. With no lantern. No fuel. His father didn’t even have any pants, and only one boot. Nor was there a first-aid kit.
And, for all they lacked, the load would still be too heavy, and Gus could not see how he would be able to pull his father home. Not even on a highway of ice did it seem possible. But that first morning he took one step and then another, and in fifteen minutes they had reached the fishing hole his father had cut from the ice. He filled the canteen, drank it down, filled it again, brought it to Harry, roused him, and made him drink. He filled the canteen a third time and stowed it in the canoe’s stern. The Remington sat among their provisions, and he lifted it out and started for the hole in the ice.
“Where are you going with that?” Harry said.
“We’re out of ammo.”
“So what.” His voice was already growing weak. “That’s my gun.”
“I’m sick of this shit.” He opened the lid. “Fuck it all.” And he dropped the rifle in the water. Then he pulled the harness back on and took a step. And another. And then he was at the beaver lodge out on the lake he did not have a name for, his father trailing silently behind. Gus turned south.
—
On the sixth day Harry began babbling and hallucinating. The sound of his ranting served only to make Gus feel more alone. All those solitary days he’d spent charting the land away from the shack had trained him to live in silence and the peace of his thoughts, which now was broken, profoundly, by his father’s whimpers.
“The ice is breaking. Papa! The fish. Papa! The ice. Look out!”
Gus would pause and take deep breaths with his elbows on his kn
ees, his face down so he wouldn’t inhale any snowflakes.
“Why didn’t she ever come down? What’s wrong with her?”
Then Gus would straighten up and take another twenty steps before he’d rest again. One hand always freezing, because he had to switch the mitten back and forth, a great annoyance.
“Nous étions trois capitaines, / de la guerre revenant / brave, brave / de la guerre revenant bravement,” he sang, his voice half croaking and half wheezing.
Snow fell in streamers throughout the windless day. Gus could hardly tell when he’d come out of the woods onto a lake. He’d walk and rest and walk and rest and for most of that day he was on a lake bearing east. As night gathered, he thought he saw lights in the distance.
“There are tracks, my son! There are tracks! Gus, mon fils! Please, stop. My boot. I’ve lost my boot!”
Perhaps it was merely a trick of the darkness, but the snow seemed to fall even harder as night came on. Gus—hoarding the last handfuls of dried fruit for a more desperate stretch of miles—had eaten only snow for twenty-four hours. He’d been walking for the last sixteen. His body no longer ached. It was no longer even a part of him. But it kept moving. It kept moving, and then they were in a tangle of frozen reeds alongshore.
“There were snakes, Gus. Mon fils! You missed their tracks. All across that lake. I believe they are following us. The ice is cracking, Papa! It’s coming apart.”
Now the snow was relenting, and sometime that night the sky unfolded its light and Gus could see they were on a frozen river. He turned to look at his father in the moonlight. He had removed the sleeping sack and bearskin. His jacket was unbuttoned and he’d even taken off his red hat. Gus stepped out of the harness and went back to the canoe. His father’s lips had split and bled and now were frozen. He looked like a corpse. Gus found the canteen but the water, too, had frozen. He would have wept if he’d been alive. But for the fourth time he had died on the borderlands. And he had killed his father. They were both dead.
He then looked at his hand in the moonlight. It was the same color as the moon itself and hurt like hell. He opened his coat and put his hand in his armpit, and he was not dead, because he was bleeding. His shoulders were bleeding and his shirt was soaked with icy blood. He covered his father again with the sleeping sack and the bearskin and then stepped back into the Duluth pack and walked on, the river purling beneath his feet, giving the melody to the song he now sang: “Par ici t’il y passe trois cavaliers barons, Dondaine, don, dondaine, don, / Que donneriez-vous, belle, Qui vous tir’rait du fond? Dondaine, don, dondaine, don…” At some point he imagined—or maybe heard—his father singing along with him.
THERE WERE last days on the borderlands, of course, and for Gus and Harry the end was also the beginning. Of the river, that is.
Its headwaters were frozen. The canopy of trees spanning its shorelines arched above in a snow-covered tangle, a high tent. He came to it in the late afternoon and thought of setting camp—he’d slept only a few hours for two nights and had little to eat beyond a moose’s fare of twigs and grass and bark, the fruit still in the canoe—but the mere thought of pitching the tent and building a fire sent him walking forward in a different sort of suffering.
As evening fell the river spread before him and the snow gave way to coursing water. He stood at the shore and considered the dark current flowing into the twilight. Was this the Burnt Wood River? Was such a thing even possible? He took out his father’s book of maps and opened it to chart 8, the facsimile of Thompson’s map of the lake and the river’s headwaters. Gus studied it longingly, as though by sheer force of wishing he could place himself on that page and in doing so save them both.
Since he had no paddle, he found a log as big around as his arm and as tall as he was, settled into the canoe, and used it to push off the shore.
The water under the keel ferrying him along was the sweetest sensation he’d ever felt, and it revived him before lulling him to something like sleep. He ought to have feared the saults and rocks and icy shores stretching before him as inevitably as the next hour, but he had no thoughts left to use. Or anyway no worries. What would come would come. It had been coming and it came and it would keep coming.
His father was sleeping. At least Gus hoped he was. Surely the sound of the water, warbling and piping and gently lapping against the canoe, was a song to set a man asleep. And the pull of that same water beneath the canoe? It was as if Morpheus was pouring it to seduce his dreamers.
Gus rode the canoe through the night, in and out of sleep as the boat bumped against rocks or the soft snow banked alongshore. At times the river was wider and slower or narrower and faster, but in either case it was doing his work for him, and for this he was more grateful than he’d ever had occasion to be. And the day broke to a bright sunrise through the trees as they sailed toward it.
Gus filled the canteen and guzzled the water and he filled it again and scooted up to his father, who was unconscious. The water merely leaked through his beard onto the frozen bearskin. So Gus settled back in the stern and covered his eyes with his arm. He slept, and then woke when the canoe was caught in a slurry of snow and ice above a frozen lake. Gus pushed for the bottom with the log pole, and after an hour’s hard work and the very last of his strength he had the canoe on solid ice and moving across that small lake. He could have sworn, looking onto its shores, that he’d slept there once upon a time. When he reached the far end of the lake the river opened again and he sat himself down and the canoe floated on.
The rest of that day the river flowed up through the keel of the canoe and into his spine and then through his mind, and his mind was flooded and would remain afloat for many, many years to come. He slept and dreamt of the water now and felt flooded. Not drowning, just coursing through him. Near dark, he woke as the canoe came to a slow and sliding stop, and he heard in the absence of its movement a waterfall, thunderous or perhaps not. Conceivably, it was instead all the water that was washing through him.
But what was unmistakable and certain—and proved by the story as it was later told to him—was the whining of snowmobiles. He tried to open his eyes but could not. He could not even open them when he heard voices familiar and gentle and strong coming through the gloaming. It was the last time Gustav Eide would be that far up the Burnt Wood River until his father went walking early this winter.
YOU’RE NOT DEAD until you’re warm and dead. That’s what they say about hypothermia. When I saw Harry the night he was brought out of the woods, he looked more than warm—he looked like a burn victim. And I couldn’t believe he was not dead. Not even for all of the medical equipment and the doctor and nurses that surrounded him at the Gunflint hospital.
I had sneaked up there after dark to see for myself what was being whispered in town: that he and Gus had been delivered by the Riverfish brothers, and that Harry would not survive the night.
The tip of his nose and his cheeks above his beard were frostbitten, blistered, and red. He was covered from ankles to chin by an electric blanket. One foot was covered, the other elevated and being treated by a nurse. His faintly orange ankle deepened through peach, umber, rust, and brown until it finally turned black near where his toes used to be. When the nurse saw me—it was Ana Olsson—she smiled and covered his foot and stepped out from behind the curtain.
“What are you doing here, Berit?” She put one hand behind her back and touched my arm with the other. “I didn’t know you were friendly with Harry Eide.”
How could I explain? Even to myself? I had gone up to the hospital because I could not wait a minute longer to see him. When I’d first heard about Harry and Gus paddling up the river, I thought, with some certainty, that I had seen the last of them, a feeling that filled me with regret and shame. So when word filtered through town that they were back, and in such shape as they were, I would not be stopped.
“Of course, you spent so much time with his mother,” Ana said.
I smiled weakly. “What happened to his foot?�
��
“Hunting accident.”
Harry? A hunting accident? I thought. In January?
She still had one hand behind her back. “His foot is the least of his problems. His body temperature was well below ninety degrees when we admitted him a couple hours ago. We’re warming him slowly, hoping to avoid cardiac arrest. He needs to make it a couple more hours. That’s what’s important now.” She spoke in a whisper and nodded behind the next curtain, where Gus slept like he was on fire. His right hand was wrapped in gauze, his hair a bird’s nest of matted curls, his young man’s beard only an inch long where it had grown in full, and I couldn’t help thinking he resembled a child because of it.
“Has his mother been here?” I asked.
“She left twenty minutes ago.”
“Will the boy be all right?”
“He’s skinny as a newborn fawn. Has a little frostbite of his own, on his hand and up on his cheeks. But mostly he’s just tired.”
“Is it true Freddy and Marcel Riverfish brought them in?”
“Honestly, Berit, it was the damnedest thing you ever saw. Those two and these two, right out of the woods.”
“Where did they find them?”
“I heard they were about to die up on the Burnt Wood River. Not twenty paces from the Devil’s Maw. Their canoe had caught in a snowbank alongshore. A few more feet to the right and they would’ve been swallowed whole.” The nurse looked at Gus for a long time and then back at me. “He looks just like his pops, doesn’t he?”
“Yes, he does.”
She patted my arm again and told me to have a seat. When she pulled the curtain to step back to work, she did so with the hand she’d been keeping behind her back. On it was a plastic glove covered in blood.
—
News of Harry and Gus coming out of the woods that January day in 1964 spread through town even faster than reports of JFK’s assassination had two months earlier. Some folks were already calling it a miracle. Others said that fate had smiled kindly on them. Surely it was a bit of both. A few even said that between Thea Eide, Harry’s grandmother, and Odd Eide, his father, the family had endured a generous portion of misfortune, and this was God’s way of evening the score.
